Photography in the Third Reich

Christopher Webster

Description

This lucid and comprehensive collection of essays by an international group of scholars constitutes a photo-historical survey of select photographers who embraced National Socialism during the Third Reich. These photographers developed and implemented physiognomic and ethnographic photography, and, through a Selbstgleichschaltung (a self-co-ordination with the regime), continued to practice as photographers throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich.



The volume explores, through photographic reproductions and accompanying analysis, diverse aspects of photography during the Third Reich, ranging from the influence of Modernism, the qualitative effect of propaganda photography, and the utilisation of technology such as colour film, to the photograph as ideological metaphor. With an emphasis on the idealised representation of the German body and the role of physiognomy within this representation, the book examines how select photographers created and developed a visual myth of the ‘master race’ and its antitheses under the auspices of the Nationalist Socialist state.



Photography in the Third Reich approaches its historical source photographs as material culture, examining their production, construction and proliferation. This detailed and informative text will be a valuable resource not only to historians studying the Third Reich, but to scholars and students of film, history of art, politics, media studies, cultural studies and holocaust studies.

Sujets

• National Socialism
• List of photographers
• Photography
• Nazi Germany

Informations

• Publié par: Open Book Publishers
• Date de parution: 07 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 4
• EAN13: 9781783749171
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

Photography In The Third Reich

Photography in the Third Reich
Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda
Edited by Christopher Webster





https://www.openbookpublishers.com
© 2021 Christopher Webster. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:
Christopher Webster, Photography in the Third Reich: Art, Physiognomy and Propaganda . Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202
In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202#copyright
Further details about CC BY licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web
Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202#resources
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.
ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-914-0
ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-915-7
ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-916-4
ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-917-1
ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-918-8
ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-919-5
DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0202
Cover image: Erich Retzlaff, Joseph Goebbels , 1933, reproduced in Wilhelm Freiherr von Müffling, ed., Wegbereiter und Vorkämpfer für das neue Deutschland ( Pioneers and Champions of the New Germany ) ( Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1933), p. 11.
Cover design by Anna Gatti.

Contents
Foreword
Eric Kurlander
vii
Introduction
1
Editor’s Introduction
Christopher Webster
1
Photo Lessons: Teaching Physiognomy during the Weimar Republic
Pepper Stetler
15
STATE
29
1.
Dark Sky, White Costumes: The Janus State of Modern Photography in Germany 1933–1945
Rolf Sachsse
31
LEADERS
59
2.
‘The Deepest Well of German Life’: Hierarchy, Physiognomy and the Imperative of Leadership in Erich Retzlaff’s Portraits of the National Socialist Elite
Christopher Webster
61
WORKERS
95
3.
The Timeless Imprint of Erna Lendvai-Dircksen’s Face of the German Race
Andrés Mario Zervigón
97
HEIMAT
129
4.
Photography, Heimat , Ideology
Ulrich Hägele
131
MYTH
171
5.
‘Transmissions from an Extrasensory World’: Ethnos and Mysticism in the Photographic Nexus
Christopher Webster
173
SCIENCE
203
6.
Science and Ideology: Photographic ‘Economies of Demonstration’ in Racial Science
Amos Morris-Reich
205
Conclusion
239
Bibliography
257
List of Illustrations
275
Index
283

Foreword
Eric Kurlander

© Eric Kurlander, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0202.08
Most scholars will recall Walter Benjamin ’s observation that fascism is defined by the ‘aestheticization of politics’. What fewer remember is that Benjamin first floated this argument in a Weimar-era book review. The review dealt with a collection of essays titled War and Warrior , which were edited by the well-known nationalist writer, Ernst Jünger. ‘The inner connection which lies at the basis of the essays collected in this volume’, Jünger explained, ‘is that of German nationalism’, a nationalism ‘that has lost its connection to both the idealism of our grandfathers and the rationalism of our fathers’ and sought ‘that substance, that layer of an absolute reality of which ideas as well as rational deductions are mere expressions’. ‘This stance is thus also a symbolic one’, Jünger continued, ‘insofar as it comprehends every act, every thought and every feeling as the symbol of a unified and unchangeable being which cannot escape its own inherent laws’. No wonder that Benjamin titled his review of Jünger’s collection, ‘Theories of German Fascism ’. 1 For Jünger had articulated well, already three years before Hitler ’s rise to power, the relationship between art, myth, and politics in radical nationalist thinking. It was a relationship that sought to escape the realm of empiricism by symbolically uniting the racial and the metaphysical in order to reveal that ‘layer of absolute reality’ that ‘rational deductions’ could never suffice to express.
The essays in this volume work to uncover this ‘layer of absolute reality’ in the realm of National Socialist photography, namely ‘the stylised representation of the body as constituent parts of the Volksgemeinschaft ’. More specifically, these essays trace the Third Reich’s creation of a ‘visual myth of the “master race ”’ through the use of physiognomy  — the science of judging character through facial features and other ‘racial’ characteristics. Although its theoretical premises were not explicitly supernatural, physiognomy belongs epistemologically to other ‘border’ or ‘fringe’ sciences ( Grenzwissenschaften ) popular in interwar Germany and Austria. These faith-based, supernaturally-inspired sciences included astrology, radiesthesia (‘pendulum dowsing’), characterology, graphology, cosmobiology, and biodynamic agriculture — together constituting an important element of what I call the ‘Nazi supernatural imaginary ’. 2 Combined with racialist ( völkisch ) esotericism, neo-paganism , and Germanic folklore, the border sciences helped the Third Reich square the circle between claims that National Socialism was a scientifically sound doctrine based on ‘applied biology’, in the words of Hitler ’s Deputy Rudolf Hess , and the blood-and-soil mysticism that undergirded National Socialist perceptions of race and space, culture and aesthetics. National Socialist attitudes toward photography, informed as they were by so-called pseudo-scientific doctrines such as physiognomy , might therefore be placed in the context of a broader supernatural imaginary that informed many aspects of German culture in the interwar period.
The authors in this volume recognize that the National Socialist preoccupation with a faith-based, quasi-religious conception of blood and soil was not the only element determining the aesthetic character and cultural trajectory of photography in the Third Reich. As Alan Steinweis, Michael Kater, Pamela Potter, and others have shown in respect to music, theatre, and the visual arts, one cannot ignore the continuities between Weimar and National Socialist-era aesthetic traditions. 3 Most of the contributors to this volume recognize such continuities in the realm of photography as well — between the ostensibly völkisch , romantic, racially organicist photography of the Third Reich and the highly modern, experimental culture of the Weimar Republic.
At the same time, one must acknowledge the mystical and irrational trends in Weimar culture itself before 1933. ‘Occult beliefs and practices permeated the aesthetic culture of modernism ,’ writes Corinna Treitel, one of the foremost experts on German esotericism. Numerous Weimar artists and intellectuals, Treitel reminds us, ‘drew on occult ideas and experiences to fuel their creative processes.’ Among these Weimar-era artists there was a shared expectation that the ‘new art speak to the soul’ by drawing ‘heavily on fin-de-siècle German Theosophy and its deeply psychological understanding of a spiritual reality that lay beyond the reach of the five senses’. 4
While such aesthetic trends were not inherently fascist, they nonetheless influenced and encouraged modes of artistic experimentation that had little to do with Weimar-era progressivism , what the film historian Lotte Eisner referred to as the ‘Mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves’, culminating ‘in the apocalyptic doctrine of Expressionism […] a weird pleasure […] in evoking horror […] a predilection for the imagery of darkness’. 5 Similarly, the Weimar social theorist Siegfried Kracauer has cited Fritz Lang ’s expressionist masterpiece, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari , as well as his later films featuring the criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse, as representative of Germany’s ‘collective soul’ wavering between ‘tyranny and chaos’. 6 In his Theses Against Occultism , Kracauer’s Frankfurt School colleague, Theodor Adorno , insisted that the interw